Abstract

Radical indeterminacy of reference is the thesis that there is no fact of the matter as to which objects singular terms refer to, and which sets of objects are in the extensions of predicates. For instance, it is indeterminate as to whether ‘London’ refers to a city in England or instead to a dormant volcano in Africa. This paper addresses a largely unexplored challenge against radical indeterminacy of reference: the claim that it is self-refuting, rendering its own thesis ineffable. I develop several versions of this challenge and argue that they mischaracterize referential indeterminacy – either by depicting it as reliant on the determinacy of reference and singular thought, or by tying it to eliminativism about reference.